Mandelbulber is an experimental application that helps to make rendering 3D Mandelbrot fractals much more accessible. A few of the supported 3D fractals: Mandelbulb, Mandelbox, BulbBox, JuliaBulb, Menger Sponge, Quaternion, Trigonometric, Hypercomplex, and Iterated Function Systems (IFS). All of these can be combined into infinite variations with the ability to hybridize different formulas together.

Architecture

Completely free, open source, GNU GPL license

32-bit and 64-bit for Windows, Linux, and Mac (Intel & PPC)

GUI created in the GTK+ environment

Multi-core rendering

Features

3D Navigator with tools to see how close the camera is to the fractal surface.

Instead of ray tracing the whole distance between the camera and the nearest surface, the ray "marches" the distance in small steps. At each step a scattering is simulated. The final result is a synthesis of the various scatterings along the length of the ray.